“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” The memo advises discretion: “Why use a codename? … [B]ecause we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Why is Anthropic destroying books? | Kathryn James
The AI company apparently found destructively scanning ‘all the books in the world’ easier than dealing with copyright in its quest for training data
theguardian.com
Driven away from pirated digital libraries by a massive $1.5 billion settlement, major AI companies have found a legal loophole: bulk-buying physical books, shearing off the spines for high-speed scanning, and then throwing the originals away.